VASKNING

We woke up this afternoon to raw sewage coming through the shower tray.  I did a sink wash and put a black top on under my dress so the hole in it didn’t show.  Jake was smiling, he’d had his hand in the wallet of his pisshead mate, Liuz again.  He kissed me and said; “’E won’t remember what ‘e spent, will ‘e?”  The money will go to a landlord on Wales Street, not a plumber.  When I left for work the flat stank of shit and when I come back it’ll be the same.  We won’t have showers anymore, bad news in this heat.

I drove down the M3 in my smashed up old car.  People moved over for me when I changed lanes, they didn’t like the look of the bonnet.  There was some fella driving a Bentley and I saw a Ferrari go by.  They talk about austerity, but there’s money.  I hear that in Westminster, the MPs don’t bother to show up to vote, they spend the day in wine bars doing fuck all and still get paid.  Politicians don’t know people like Jake and me exist and there are women by the Hamble River who wish that I don’t.

I parked the car and walked in flats to the river, my heels in my bag.  Down there, the restaurants are full, even on Monday nights.  Yeah, there’s money everywhere.  Someone told me that on the continent there’s kids so rich that they’ll buy two bottles of champagne and ask the bar person to pour one down the sink – it’s called vaskning.

The Jolly Sailor was full of the yachting crowd.  I sat quietly at the bar with a glass of water.  There was a man there looking shifty, he was eighteen stone, jowly and sweaty.  My beat up car doesn’t have air conditioning, but I was decent enough to wear perfume, I doubted he’d smell as nice as me.  I smiled and he realised I was the woman from the internet.  He looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. 

Simon commutes to London to work in the City, he talked about being a stock broker, about cars he drove, his two homes, yacht, his wife and children.  He told me how they’d never want for anything.  He’s paying his kids’ tuition fees outright, so they won’t leave uni in debt.  I wanted to smash his face in and burn his house down.  Instead I smiled, let him buy me champagne and let him fuck me in the cabin of his yacht. 

Now he’s asleep and I’ve opened his wallet.  Gold cards, pictures of his wife, membership of Boodle’s club - the one that doesn’t let women in ...  I take the wad of cash and look at him lying there snoring, pissed on champagne, sated by sex.  Scumbag.  I’ll use the shower before I go.